When is Pretending Adapting and When is it Masking?
With respect to social behaviors that don’t come naturally to you, at what point does doing them anyway harm you?
In a recent essay in The Paris Review, Heather Bursch recalls the fluid self she had while waitressing at Balthazar, a tony French restaurant in New York City, when she was 26 years old.
“Was I nicer than other people at the restaurant? I was. Was it genuine? That depends on what you mean by ‘genuine.’ I’d kind of grown this personality, or I thought I had… Almost thirty years later, I can still feel the waiterly poses in my body. I can feel my weight shift, my head tilt. I pause when I hit a mark and wait for the customer to absorb its shape and meaning. Shift, land. Shift, land.”
Bursch didn’t know much about fancy serving norms, so she tried extra-hard to be pleasant to customers. It worked: The diners liked her, and the restaurant kept her on even though she couldn’t name the different types of oysters or smoothly remove the cork from a Côtes du Rhône bottle. Even now she can’t say whether her waiterly behavior was the real Heather or not.
Bursch‘s essay meshes nicely with a theme I’ve been turning over in my mind lately. In a culture where introverts often get judged as abnormal, innumerable introverts feel under pressure to act socially smooth, talkative and upbeat, especially at school or at work. Is that kind of acting always bad? In some instances, it amounts to simply learning a skill, like cooking an omelet or driving a car, that the person can use or not. You can learn to approach strangers, for instance, to say “Glad to meet you” as if you mean it or to keep silly conversations going longer than the average tennis volley.
In other instances, such acting involves taking on an extroverted role that becomes physically and mentally exhausting for the typical introvert the longer and deeper the act goes on. Continuing in that direction, it amounts to pretending to be someone one is not, fooling strangers, coworkers and acquaintances about one’s actual personality and preferences.
On the one hand, I remember many evenings I spent at networking events when I lived in Boston and was building a business. When I went up to someone standing alone, introduced myself and asked what they did, I didn’t feel I was faking being someone I wasn’t.
Approaching a stranger was a stretch for me, but I genuinely enjoyed one-on-one conversations where I might learn something or begin to make a friend. I regarded it as doing something grownup and productive that was initially out of my comfort zone. Heather Bursch’s extra-nice efforts at Balthazar seem to me to fall into this category of skill learning, too.
Note that I didn’t pursue an encounter by cracking jokes, breaking into a chummy group or chitchatting about the Red Sox, any of which would be highly uncharacteristic of me. After I outstretched a hand, the other person was conversing with the real me.
On the other hand, I recently came across a couple of blog posts where introverts described themselves as “masking” throughout their daily lives. As I understand it, this is a term often used by high-functioning autistic people for their exhausting efforts from dawn to bedtime to come across as socially “normal” in order to be more accepted. To understand better the difference between the mild stretching of adapting and the high stress of masking, and how this might apply to introverts, I read up on “masking” and the pain that accompanies such a long-lasting, comprehensive type of pretending.
Based on my research, here are some criteria that can help you decide whether a certain level of pretense should best be understood as adapting or masking.
1. Is the behavior motivated by fear and judgment? People who mask typically are afraid of being stigmatized and excluded. They resent the implication that their natural manner of being is judged negatively, yet they try to “pass.” On the other hand, those adapting may be making a strategic, situational choice so as to fit in briefly or achieve a specific aim, like impressing a hiring committee. Adaptation is more like dressing up for an occasion than like censoring or suppressing disparaged habits, inclinations and desires.
2. Is there hiding of one’s true nature? Masking feels like a massive, far-reaching mismatch between how one is acting and how one really is. One’s authentic self disappears beneath the mask. Daily masking thus can involve a distressing compromise or loss of identity. In contrast, adapting involves minor changes that add to one’s behavioral repertoire – not concealment or disguise. You’re still you, though perhaps in a different mode, the way we all learn to speak differently with friends than with teachers or employers.
3. How mentally demanding is the faking? Masking requires relentless, constant attention to the pretense: Am I making enough eye contact? Here I need to smile and there I had better nod, etc. Ever-needed coping mechanisms tend to lead to exhaustion, despair and burnout. Adaptation, however, involves the kind of attentive effort required for any new learning, but once learned, the new behavior may no longer demand constant self-monitoring. Therefore, adapting isn’t anywhere as fatiguing as masking, though it still can cause a need for recovery time.
4. Is the behavior change demeaning or empowering? Does the mental tape run along the lines of I’m really no good without pretending or With this acting, I can get where I want to go? Masking feels less like a choice than like a necessity, while adapting feels more voluntary and intentional.
Most introverts make at least some behavioral compromises in comparison with choices they might make in a world that accepted and accommodated the full range of personality differences. Choices that can be described as adaptations carry much less danger for the person’s physical and mental well-being than those that reach the level of masking.